Month: January 2011

Nyhan contends that "journalistic claims about 'turning points' are best understood as metaphors that are used to used to manufacture dramatic narratives":

It's possible, of course, that the Tucson shootings or the president's response to it will have some small effect on our nation's politics, but the idea that it will restore civility or decrease polarization is implausible. What's more likely is that the president's speech in Arizona and/or his State of the Union address will be framed as "turning points" if the economy improves and Obama wins re-election in 2012. If the economy continues to perform poorly and he loses, however, some other "turning point" will be selected to "explain" his defeat (the outburst of anger against health care reform in summer 2009, the Republican landslide in the midterm elections, etc.) — whatever best fits the narrative.

Mickey explains why it will help the GOP:

Now that the [GOP have] won the House in an off year election, GOP pols don't need to please the base so much. They need the middle. They need swing congressmen to vote for their bills and they need supportive poll numbers to encourage those congressmen to do so. If a "civility" crusade succeeds in getting the most volatile Republicans to cool it and stop irritating the center, it won't be doing Obama's work for him. It will be doing John Boehner's work for him.

Rank-and-file conservatives don't realize this. They still think – despite ample contrary evidence – that their interests allign with Palin, Beck and Limbaugh. They're paying an awfully high price for catharsis. And Palin, Beck and Limbaugh are becoming very, very rich off it.

Jennifer Rubin attempts it. She imagines that "George W. Bush must be pleased to see the debate breakout over the best route to Middle East democracy" and claims that it "was only a few years that the liberal elite assured us that Muslim self-rule was a fantasy." Larison counters:

In 2003, Muslim self-rule was already a reality in Turkey, Bangladesh, and Indonesia. The fantasy was the idea that the U.S. could forcibly topple an authoritarian government and readily install a functioning liberal democratic government in Iraq, and that this would then lead to regional transformation. Except for the first part, none of this happened. So far, the Tunisians seem to be managing much better on their own than Iraq did under the tutelage of U.S. occupiers.

Serwer pounces on an earlier Rubin post:

Rubin doesn't even attempt to prove causation — eight years ago, the U.S. invaded Iraq, and last week there was an uprising in Tunisia. Ergo Bush deserves the credit. This is deeply paternalistic — in Rubin's version of history, the Tunisians who faced down the security forces of an autocratic regime are practically bit players in their own political upheaval.  The point is not to make an actual argument, but to inject a political narrative that will retroactively vindicate the decision to go to war in Iraq, as though the American people would ever forget that the Bush administration justified that decision by manufacturing an imminent danger in the form of WMD that were never found. "Democracy in the Muslim World" was not the primary reason given for invading Iraq, and even as a retroactive justification it remains weak.

Middle East correspondent Dan Murphy sides with Serwer:

Before I read Rubin's piece earlier today, Simon Hawkins, an anthropology professor at Franklin and Marshall, was kind enough to chat with me about Tunisian politics and history. Hawkins, whose dissertation was about Tunisia, has been coming and going from the country since the late 1980s. He recounted (unprompted) how the word "democracy" had been given a bad name among many of the Tunisian youth (the same sorts who led the uprising against Ben Ali) because of the Iraq experience, "That's democracy," a group of Tunisian youths said to him in 2006 of Iraq. "No thanks."

A reader submits a clever compilation of British animal voiceovers:

You may recall this lengthy post exposing the conservative talking point that President Obama rejects American exceptionalism. The claim is particularly galling because the proof those who make it always cite is an egregiously truncated quote from a speech where Obama eloquently explains his belief in that very thing. The Weekly Standard is still doing it.

And the blatant falsehood is parroted elsewhere too. Abe Greenwald doesn't rely on the truncated quote, but he seems utterly oblivious to Obama's stance on the issue. As does George Will in his latest. And notice how TWS defends its position:

Gallup reported as recently as December 22 that 80 percent of Americans believe “the U.S. has a unique character which makes it the greatest country in the world.” Only 58 percent think that President Obama shares their belief.

Well, maybe that's because the entire right has been telling lies about this for the last three years.

David Frum says that "that there are really only two presidential primaries in the GOP: The evangelical primary and the business primary." After Palin's recent performance, he believes that "Mike Huckabee [is] the presumptive winner of the evangelical primary":

Suppose you are a faith & family voter: strongly socially conservative, strongly opposed to Barack Obama. By now you have thoroughly absorbed the idea that Palin is electorally radioactive. Quietly, you may also have your own reservations about Palin’s character, temperament and judgment. If you didn’t have an alternative, you might have to stick to her. But you do have an alternative: in fact it’s your own first choice from 2008. Easy call, yes?

Does David really believe this about the Palinites? I hope he's right. I fear he's very wrong. Huckabee's fiscal record is liberal and he pardoned a cop-killer. He's a very genial person and would be a powerful antidote to the increasingly angry image of the GOP. But cult-followers do not abandon their icons easily. I still believe the nomination is hers to lose. And fervently hope I'm wrong.

This trend is getting out of control:

A 25-year-old unemployed man set himself on fire in an attempted suicide in a building in the Khurshid district in Alexandria. He was severely burnt and has been unable to be questioned by police. Ahmed Hesham El-Sayed is the third Egyptian to set fire to himself in two days.

Update:

2125 GMT: In Algeria, a woman "about 40 years old" tried to set herself on fire on Tuesday in the resort of Sidi Ali Benyoub, 600 kilometres (370 miles) west of Algiers. It is the 7th case of self-immolation in the last week in Algeria.

Giovanni Marks reminisces:

[T]hings you missed include: the first 30 years of smog, serious war demonstrations, getting LSD tested on you unknowingly, really organized cults, obligatory sex in drive-in theatres, old fashioned two-gang street brawls on abandoned cul-de-sacs, wearing karate slippers and a gold rope to a nice club and being let in, the mall being the sickest place to chillax on Earth, everyone wearing tight pants and it being perfectly normal, a flannel and khakis being the default wardrobe of a murderer.

Ross "Who's Sarah Palin?" Douthat blamed the media for fixating on the farce from Google search. Nate Silver measures the demand for news on Palin:

If news coverage were based on a pure supply-and-demand model — that is, as an exercise in maximizing near-term pageviews or ratings points — it is not clear to me whether there would be less or more coverage of Ms. Palin. My guess is that there would be more, although the same might also be true of shark attacks and Natalee Holloway.

Irin Carmon rejects the tone and thesis of Caitlin Flanagan's new piece in The Atlantic, on the Duke Fuck List, composed by a female undergrad:

The central thesis of Flanagan's piece is that Karen Owen really wanted love and affection, like all women do, but she was confused by the alleged feminist mandate to get wasted and have random sex with callous dudes. (I think I missed that memo.) …

The decade-long hysteria over a "hookup culture," imperiling young women who have been brainwashed into binge-drinking away their ingrained biological desires for cuddling and babies, doesn't match any reality I've seen or heard of beyond pseudo-concerned trend stories. There are some people who are more interested in casual sex, sometimes; some of them are women, and some of them are drunk at the time, and it's not a death knell for a committed relationship somewhere along the way if that's what you want. It's not that gender inequality doesn't inform the power dynamics of casual sex, on campus or elsewhere. It's that it's hard to believe these handwringers are interested, in good faith, in creating a better environment of safe, enthusiastic consent when they're so busy ignoring the fact that women like sex too. Or judging us for it.